Lisa Marie Presley was the only child of Elvis Presley, the singer millions called the King of Rock and Roll. She grew up inside Graceland, the big Memphis house her father bought when he was still a young man, and for the first nine years of her life she pretty much had him to herself.
Years later she sat down and recorded hours of tapes about that life. She wanted to tell it in her own voice. Before she could finish, Lisa Marie passed away in January 2023. Her daughter, the actress Riley Keough, took those tapes and turned them into a book called “From Here to the Great Unknown,” which came out in October 2024.
The sweetest parts are the ones about her dad.
When Lisa Marie was small, she didn’t see Elvis the way the rest of the world did. To her he wasn’t the famous man on the record covers. He was something much bigger than that, and she really believed it.
You can feel a little of that bond in the video below. It sets her grown-up voice against her father’s on an old song he loved, over home movies of the two of them together at Graceland.
Elvis and Lisa Marie singing together, over home movies of father and daughter
So here’s what she thought he could do. In the book she says, as a child, she was sure her father could change the weather.
“I felt my father could change the weather. He was a god to me. A chosen human being.”
She wasn’t reaching for a pretty way to say she loved him. To a little girl it felt plain and true. What she was really describing was his mood. When Elvis was up, the whole house felt light and warm. When he was down, everybody in it felt that too. From the floor of a child’s world, a man like that really can seem to move the sky around.
She wrote about the pull he had on people too. “He had that thing where you could see his soul,” she said. And the thing she loved more than anything else was the simplest thing of all. “Going to his shows was my favorite thing in the world.”
And the part that stayed with her most was a plain, ordinary thing, just being next to him. “I just remember that feeling of walking next to him, holding his hand.”
If you’d like to hear it the way she meant it, there’s a sample of the audiobook, read straight from her own recordings.
A sample from Lisa Marie’s audiobook, read from her own tapes
The book is full of little moments like that, a daughter remembering a father who just happened to be the most famous man alive. For all the gold records and the sold-out rooms, the Elvis she put on the page is the one holding her hand in the hallways at Graceland. That’s the one she missed.